This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Kenyon chapter.
Ah, yes. The dreaded question. The question that is bound to come up in conversation at some point during any session of small talk. The question that I hate most of all, because my answer to it is so unbelievably lame.
“So, what type of music do you listen to?”
This question can come in other forms, too.
“What’s your favorite band or singer?”
“What genre of music is best?”
No matter how it’s phrased, I try to avoid answering this question like the plague. The truth is that I actually do not like listening to music at all. I’d rather listen to silence. Every time I have told somebody this, I have gotten a response akin to “Really? That’s different” or “There must be something wrong with you” People, it seems, cling so much to music that it is impossible for them to imagine someone who doesn’t enjoy it as much.
Personally, I find music to be incredibly distracting. I have been to several concerts and, even though it makes me sound old when I say it, I have found them to be too loud and too full of excited fans for me to enjoy them as much as I want to. Personally, I enjoy observing the antics of the bands on stage, realizing that these musicians are “real people”, rather than listening to their music live. I don’t listen to music when I drive, or else I will miss an exit or take a wrong turn, and I don’t listen to music when I’m studying because I will forget everything that I try to memorize. I even keep the music off when I’m doing mindless things such as surfing the Internet; there’s already so much going on in my mind that I find the added melodies and lyrics to be overwhelming.
Some people, it seems, are too attached to their music that it seems like their headphones are a part of their bodies. People are so plugged in to their iPods that they are almost cut off from the rest of the world. But what I enjoy about silence is that I get to appreciate the simple sounds of life; I get to learn so much about other people by catching fragments of their conversations as they walk by and I get to learn so much about myself by getting caught up in my own thoughts without background noise.
There are people who rave about how emotionally attached they are to a specific song or band. While I have adored certain bands in the past, looking back, I feel as if some of this love was just exaggerated so that I wouldn’t feel left out when everybody else was talking about music. I have also heard many people say that “music is everything” to them. What I don’t understand is how music can be “everything” if there is so much of the world to offer outside of an iPod.
So maybe next time, pull those headphones out of your ears and take the time to appreciate the silence. You may hear something important.